By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Be very careful. The US economic expansion is long in the tooth and starting to hit the time-honoured constraints that mark the last phase of the business cycle. Wall Street equities are more stretched by a host of measures than they were at the peak of sub-prime bubble just before the Lehman […]

[The S&P 500 peaked on March 24, 2000, if we adjust for price inflation. This newsletter was sent on March 3, 2000.] The mark of a mania is when the general public senses that it has been left out of the cornucopia of great wealth. People think they had great wealth in their hands — […]

It was the beginning of the end of the 1982-2000 stock market boom. Discounted for price inflation, the S&P 500 has never reached what it was on March 24, 2000. I thought the boom was close to the end. I sent my Remnant Review subscribers my first warning. I followed with another warning in March. […]

David Stockman has written the finest piece of financial journalism of our generation: The Great Deformation: The Corruption of American Capitalism. It shows how we got into the mess we are in. Blame the government. Then blame us. It is our government. We must not parrot Flip Wilson’s Geraldine: “The devil made me do it!” […]

Federal tax receipts are approaching 17.5% of GDP. Whenever the percentage gets this high, a recession follows. That’s the bad news. What’s the good news? The percentage rarely gets above this, and when it does, there is a recession. Receipts fall. This means that the federal government cannot get above 20%. It can borrow to […]

Pay attention. In recent months, the U.S. stock market has gone nowhere: up, down, up, down. No pattern. Yesterday, the world’s stock markets tanked. No warning. Wham! No single central bank is responsible. No single central bank can goose the world’s stock markets. No coordinated policy is likely . . . yet. There is no […]

By Wolf Richter The healthcare merger binge on Monday came in the nick of time. While the overall US economy is struggling to grow at anything faster than the puny pace of 2.3% per year, healthcare spending has been on a tear, rapidly grabbing an ever larger part of the economy. If it hadn’t been for […]

By David Stockman So now the third immense financial bubble of this century has been fully inflated. And there are abundant signs that what we really have is a Great Immoderation—–a baleful, not beneficent, development that can be laid exactly at the door step of the central bank. Specifically, yesterday’s abysmal data on the soaring wholesale sales/inventory ratio (I/S ratio) is not […]

by David Stockman The robo-traders and Wall Street punters were busy painting the tape yesterday, and did bump the Nasdaq composite across the magic 5,000 threshold for the first time since March 2000. But even as Wall Street urged home-gamers to “return with us to the thrilling days of yesteryear”, the caveats about “this time […]